Mastermind Warning.

Thanks Micky, i'll look into it.
Shiney, it sounds like we have the same amount of photos :D
All the other images too, like avatars i've saved and collected over the years - all gone

 

Yes its a shame you lost them, (if it helps I lost a lot of videos because I chose "all" not "one") But look on the bright side, you can take a whole load more NEW pictures, and have fun doing it.

 

Louise sorry to hear that.

I hope that your broadband router (wired or wireless is secured) and you have a good anti-virus programme installed, up to date, and running (there are decent free ones).

As far as storage is concerned, an external drive is an excellent idea. In the meantime, smaller but effective, is CDs which is what I use to archive my images and docs. This thread has reminded me that I haven't done it for a while :(

All the best

 

Trouble with cd's is they take a while to burn, can be broken and take up a lot of physical space, you will always be better off with an external hard drive.

I used to collect music CD's not any more, binned them all, they take up too much space. (You have to bear in mind its the cd, the box it came in then the "storage unit / thing" the box sits in.
Don't get that problem with external hard drive.

 

Unless you have reformatted your Hard Drive where all your material was stored, it is still there. Nothing is removed from a hard drive until it is either formatted or written over. All that is removed is the pointer where the material is actually stored on the Disc. You can retrieve anything from your hard drive with a little effort (the important thing is to NEVER reformat your hard drive until you have tried). I am surprised your expert did not at least try to get your stuff back.
We had a similar problem a few years back and I managed to get everything from the corrupted drive (except Music for some reason, but I had all of the songs on CD so no problem).
The program I ran was a free one from the GIMP site. Not sure what it was called, but it was dead easy to use. I will find it for you if you have not formatted your drive.

 

Palustris, i'll get more info for you.

 

This free download will find any files then give you the option to recover them.

Recovery Software | Recovering Deleted Files

Download the program from there and just run a full scan on your computer.

There's a quick Youtube video which talks you through it.

Restore Data From Hard Drive EASILY - YouTube

 

Very similar to the one I used.